To depict two kindred characters one by means of the other, to have them mutually reflect one another without their becoming aware of it, would surely be the triumph of delineation.
It is a masterly trait in the _Prince of Homburg_ that the suspicion that the Elector has had the Prince condemned to death, not so much on account of the act of overhastiness committed on the battlefield as for another reason, does not arise spontaneously in the Prince"s soul, but is first awakened by Hohenzollern"s questioning.
A double process must take place in the mind of the true poet before it can evolve anything. The crude matter must be resolved into an idea, and the idea must condense again into a form. Man is the continuation of the act of creation, an eternally growing, never completed creation, which prevents the termination of the world and keeps it from congealing and hardening. It is highly significant (this thought led me to the one I have just expressed) that everything which exists as a human conception is never wholly and perfectly--only fragmentarily--embodied in nature, and everything which exists perfectly and completely in nature eludes human conception, man"s own nature not excepted. Thus we know and define right and wrong, virtue and innocence (the latter as soon as we have lost it), but not life itself, etc. Where knowledge has been vouchsafed us, there nature requires our cooperation.
The first and last aim of art is to render intuitively perceptible the process of life itself, to show how the soul of man develops in the atmosphere surrounding him, let it be suited to him or not, how good engenders evil within him, and evil in turn produces something less evil, and how this eternal growth has a limit so far as our apprehension is concerned, but none at all in reality; this is symbolization. It is an error when men say that only the fully developed is matter for the poet; on the contrary, what is in process of development, what is first begotten in conflict with the elements of creation, that is matter for him. What is finished can be only a plaything of the waves, it can only be destroyed and devoured by them; can art have anything to do with that which is most common, in other words, most universal? But what is in process of development must pa.s.s from one form into another at the hands of the poet, it must never as formless soft clay dissolve before our eyes into chaos and confusion; it must always, in a certain sense, be at the same time a finished product, just as in the universe we never encounter naked raw material. Man exists only because of his future; an inexplicable mystery, but one that may not be denied. Man, therefore, cannot be brought before us as something complete in himself; for not how he affects the world but how the world affects him arouses our interest and is of importance to us; the great forces and powers outside of him find embodiment by exerting an influence over him, and thus lose their formidableness, the riddle of the universe is solved as soon as it finds utterance, and even though at the end a question remains, we can bear this much easier than an empty nothing.
Not only in art but in history as well life sometimes a.s.sumes a form, and art should not seek her subjects and her themes where this has occurred.
G.o.d was a mystery to Himself before the creation; He had to create in order to understand Himself. If only some one thing had been completely explained, then everything would be explained.
The motives before a deed are usually transformed during the deed, and at least seem quite different after the deed: this is an important circ.u.mstance which most dramatists overlook.
Lyric poetry has something childlike about it, dramatic poetry something manly, epic poetry something senile.
Two hands can indeed clasp one another but cannot grow together. This is the relation of one individuality to another.
(1840)
From my conception of form many consequences ensue of the most varied kind. In reference to lyric poetry: the whole emotional life is a shower, the emotion which is singled out is a drop illumined by the sun.
Dramatic poetry: form is the point where divine and human strength neutralize one another.
The true idyll results when a man is represented as happy and complete in himself within his own appointed sphere. So long as he remains within this sphere fate has no power over him.
Poetry of the highest kind is the true historiography. It grasps the result of historical processes and holds it fast in imperishable images as, for example, Sophocles has done with the idea of h.e.l.lenism.
All life is a struggle of the individual with the universe.
Duality pervades all our intuitions and thoughts and every moment of our being, and is our supreme, our last idea. Beside it we, have absolutely no fundamental idea. Life and death, health and sickness, time and eternity: we can imagine and picture to ourselves how one gradually shades off into the other, but not that which lies behind these divided dualities as a common solvent and reconciliation. (1841)
_Antigone_, representing as it does a romantic individual subject in a cla.s.sical form, is the masterpiece of tragic art.
Life is the attempt of the defiantly refractory part to tear itself loose from the whole and to exist for itself, an attempt that succeeds just so long as the strength endures which was robbed from the whole by the individual separation.
"What a man can become, that he is already." G.o.d will not lay the decisive weight on the sins committed by sinful individuals against one another but only on the sins committed against the idea itself, and there actual and merely possible sins are one and the same.
(1843)
Expiation in tragedy occurs in the interest of the community, not in that of the individual, the hero, and it is not at all necessary, although it is better, that he himself should be conscious of it. Life is the great river, individualities are drops; tragic individualities are, however, blocks of ice which must be liquefied again, and in order that this may be possible they must break and wear themselves away one against the other.
There is only one necessity, which is that the world should continue to exist; what happens to individuals in the world is of no consequence.
The evil that they commit must be punished because it endangers the existence of the world; but there is no reason why they should be indemnified for the misfortune that befalls them.
(1844)
Absolutely everything depends upon a right conception of guilt. Guilt must not, in any direction, be confounded with the subordinate conception of sin, which even in the modern drama--where indeed it finds, for reasons which are not far to seek, a wider scope than in the ancient--must always be merged again into the conception of guilt, if the drama is to rise above the anecdotal to the symbolical. For the conception of tragic guilt can be developed only from life itself, from the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon--which incongruity manifests itself in the phenomenon as extravagance, the natural consequence of the instinct of self-preservation and self-a.s.sertion, the first and most legitimate of all instincts. But it cannot be developed from one of the many consequences of this original incongruity, which lead us too far down into the errors and aberrations of the individual to allow the working out of the highest dramatic possibilities. So, too, the conception of tragic expiation should be developed only from extravagance, which, since it is irrepressible in the phenomenon, represses the phenomenon, and thus frees the idea again from its imperfect form. It is true the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon remains unremoved and unovercome; but it is evident that in the sphere of life, which art, so long as it understands itself, will never go beyond, nothing can be removed that lies outside this sphere, and that art reaches its supreme goal when it seizes upon the immediate consequence of this incongruity, extravagance, and points out in it the element of self-destruction; but leaves the incongruity enshrouded in the darkness of creation, unexplained, as a fact immediately posited.
(1845)
A genuine drama may be compared to one of those great buildings which have almost as many pa.s.sages and rooms below the earth as above it.
Ordinary people only know the former; the architect knows the latter also.
A king has less right than any other person to be an individual.
(1846)
In the poet humanity dreams. Decidedly, a dream is for the spirit what sleep is for the body.
As every crystallization is dependent upon certain physical conditions, so every individualization of human nature depends upon the state of the historical epoch in which it occurs. To represent these modifications of human nature in their relative necessity is the main task which poetry has to fulfill in contradistinction to history, and here it can, if it attains to pure form, render a supreme service. But it is difficult to separate the merely incidental from the main task and then besides to avoid subjective moods; so that we scarcely have even the beginnings of such poems as now hover before my mind.
(1847)
To present the necessary, but in the form of the accidental: that is the whole secret of dramatic style.
If the characters do not negate the moral idea, what does it matter that the piece affirms it? The negation of the individual factors must be so very decided, precisely in order to give emphasis to the affirmation of the whole.
Human inst.i.tutions require a man to be a man like other men; but man, whoever and whatever he may be, wishes to be an individual, indeed is, as such, individualized. Hence the rupture.
Let the understanding question in a work of art, but do not let it answer.
(1848)
The understanding no more makes poetry than salt makes food, but it is necessary to poetry as salt is to food.
(1849)
One does not sit down to play on the piano in order to verify mathematical laws. Just as little does one write poetry in order to demonstrate something. Oh, if people would only learn to comprehend that! Indeed the beauty of all the higher activity of man is precisely the fact, that ends which the individual never even thinks of are attained thereby.
(1853)
The process of dramatic individualization is perhaps best ill.u.s.trated by comparison to water. Everywhere water is water and man is man, but as the former acquires a mysterious flavor from every stratum of earth that it flows or trickles through, so man acquires a peculiarity from his time, his nation, history, and fate.
(1857) Man would perhaps still have as acute senses as animals, if thinking did not divert him from the outer world.
(1859)
Ideas are the same thing in the drama that counterpoint is in music; nothing in themselves but the primary condition for everything.
(1861)
(Concerning my _Nibelungen_.)
It seems to me that a purely human tragedy, natural in all its motifs, can be constructed upon the mythical foundation inseparable from this subject, and that so far as my powers permit I have constructed one. The mysticism of the background should at most remind us that what we hear in this poem is not the seconds" clock, which measures off the existence of gnats and ants, but the clock that marks the hours only. Let the reader who is nevertheless disturbed by the mythical foundation consider that, if he examines closely, he will also discover such a basis in man himself, and that, too, in the mere man, in the representative of the species, and not only in the more specific branch of the same, in the individual. Or may man"s fundamental qualities, either physical or mental, be accounted for, that is to say, can they be deduced from any other organic canon than the one which has been posited once for all with man himself, and which cannot be traced farther back to a final primitive cause of things, or be critically resolved into its components? Are they not in part, as for example most of the pa.s.sions, opposed to reason and conscience, therefore to the very faculties of man which, being quite general and disinterested, may most safely be designated as those which connect him immediately with the universe, and has this contradiction ever been explained away? Why, then, in art negate an act upon which is founded even our view of nature?
Otto Prechtler related to me the following incident. When Grillparzer made my acquaintance upon my arrival in Vienna he said to Prechtler: "No one on earth will be able to influence this man. One person might have done so, but he is dead; I mean Goethe." A few years later he added, "I was mistaken, not even Goethe would have been able to influence him."
(1863)
I do not know the world, for although I myself represent a piece of it, this is such a minutely small part that no conclusion as to the true nature of the world can be deduced therefrom. Man, however, I know, for I am myself a man, and even though I do not know how he originates in the world, yet I know very well how, having once originated, he reacts upon it. I therefore conscientiously respect the laws of the human soul; in reference to everything else, however, I believe that imagination draws inspiration from the same depths out of which the world itself arose, that is to say, the multifarious series of phenomena which exists at present, but which at some future time, may perhaps be replaced by another.